Chris Selley: Pussy Riot might go to jail in the West, too

Chris Selley: Pussy Riot might go to jail in the West, too

It’s tough to think of a novel take on the plight of the Russian punk-protest band Pussy Riot. Is two years in prison for rudely interrupting a church service in any way supportable? No. Was the trial a sham? Sure seems like it. Is Vladimir Putin a thug? Are those who resist his thuggery to be commended? Yes two times.

But the case does offer an interesting insight into the nature and limits of well-meaning Western activism — and, I think, of free speech. At Macleans.ca, Colby Cosh noted that a campaign to shame the Canadian government into extending consular assistance to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who may hold permanent residence status but is not a citizen, actually bolstered the Kremlin’s paranoid-populist claim that the Pussy Rioters are “foreign agents.”

And in The New York Times, journalist Vadim Nikitin noted that as a member of the radical performance artist troupe Voina (“war”), Ms. Tolokonnikova had participated, “naked and heavily pregnant, in a public orgy at a Moscow museum in 2008.” In the past, he reported, Voina had “set fire to a police car and drew obscene images on a St. Petersburg drawbridge.”

“Stunts like that would get you arrested just about anywhere,” he wrote. “Pussy Riot and its comrades at Voina come as a full package: You can’t have the fun, pro-democracy, anti-Putin feminism without the incendiary anarchism, extreme sexual provocations, deliberate obscenity and hard-left politics. … Unless you are comfortable with all that … then standing behind Pussy Riot only now, when it is obviously blameless and the government clearly guilty, is pure opportunism.”

That’s not quite right: Sticking your neck out on a point of order for someone you don’t like is an unalloyed and too-rare virtue. Among other deleterious effects, its scarcity facilitates known or suspected ne’er-do-wells like Donald Marshall, Jr. — “author of his own misfortune,” said the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal — being falsely convicted of crimes.

But that doesn’t mean you have to becomea fan of Pussy Riot. As Mr. Nikitin says, many of the band’s supporters in Western countries would deplore their tactics, and indeed their politics, if they were playing out on their own streets. And this, too, is in the nature of political activism: It’s fine if someone is a sympathetic victim of The Man, but it’s far easier to rile people up if she’s made into a hero. Mr. Nikitin is quite right: If you’re walking around town in a Pussy Riot T-shirt, you’re supporting more than its members’ freedom. For one thing, you’re supporting people busting into churches and freaking out the nuns and parishioners.

Particularly since 9/11, there has been a move in certain Western nations, notably in the United Kingdom, to protect religious people not just from hatred, but from insult. So it was interesting to see that Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt declared himself “deeply concerned” by the Pussy Riot sentence, which he said “can only be considered a disproportionate response to an expression of political belief.” Not “inappropriate,” just “disproportionate.”

British law prohibits “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” and “disorderly behaviour” that is either intended to “cause a person harassment, alarm or distress” or that is uttered or displayed “within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.”

The latter offence leaves you open merely to a fine, but the former to six months in prison. And religion is an aggravating factor. If the offender is motivated by “hostility based on the victim’s membership (or presumed membership) of a racial or religious group,” the maximum penalty increases to six months and two years — Pussy Riot’s sentence, you’ll notice — respectively.

Would bursting into a mosque or cathedral in London and shouting, inter alia, “shit, shit, the Lord’s shit,” qualify? (That’s a lyric from “Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away,” which Pussy Riot performed, sort of, at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.) Maybe, maybe not. Surely it would cause “alarm” and “distress.” You can certainly go to jail in Britain for racist Tweeting, as an unlucky young Welsh university student found out after mocking a badly injured black soccer player. Why not anti-religious Tweeting? This is a country whose Association of Chief Police Officers’ “e-crime expert” recently recommended a crackdown on Internet “trolls.” Here in Canada, it’s not hard to imagine a human rights tribunal, at least, presiding over a similar case in defence of a statutorily protected group of citizens.

There would be none of the KGB-esque political overtones, of course. Still, it seems a bit odd to rail against the punishment handed down to Pussy Riot by a politicized justice system when it’s entirely conceivable that an independent justice system in a country like the U.K. might have punished them for exactly the same thing — probably not so harshly, though the law provides for it. The Russian judge mentioned anti-religious hostility as an aggravating factor in the sentencing — on this point, at least, she was credible — just as her British counterpart might have. Surely that’s either right or it’s wrong.

If Western people don’t like the idea of Russian courts privileging some groups and de-privileging others, maybe it’s time to reaffirm the same principle in our own courts: Offenders and victims, all equal under the law. Fomenting hate is one thing. But in a free country, religion should offer neither special license to offend nor shelter from criticism, however vigorous or crude.